White House honors labor leader who led minimum wage fight

President Obama can’t get House Republicans to move on hiking the minimum wage, but he is honoring as “Champions of Change” a bevy of American activists who have fought for economic justice at the state and local level.

Seattle’s savviest young labor leader — David Rolf — is one of the “Champions.”

Rolf is president of Service Employees International Union local 775, which represents some 43,000 nursing home and home health care workers in Washington. He organized and staffed the initiative campaign that saw the city of Sea-Tac narrowly vote for a $15-an-hour minimum wage last November.

Rolf was co-chair of Mayor Ed Murray’s 24-member Income Inequality Advisory Committee, which came up with a plan to phase-in the $15 wage, over a period that extends up to seven years for some of the city’s small businesses.

Ultimately, 21 out of 24 panel members signed onto the plan — exactly the “super-majority” that Murray had sought. (Socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant was one of three members who abstained.)

Rolf is on an unusual list of White House honorees.

He will be joining Bene’t Holmes, an $8.75-an-hour Wal-Mart worker who has campaigned for greater workplace health protection of pregnant workers, and asked Wal-Mart to commit to paying its workers at least $25,000 a year — and stop retaliating against those who campaign for higher pay.

Naquasia LaGrand is a three-year Kentucky Fried Chicken worker in Brooklyn, N.Y., who earns New York’s minimum wage of $8.00 an hour. LaGrand joined the city’s first fast food workers strike in 2012 and has become a nationwide campaigner for a living wage.

The White House is also honoring a prince of an employer. He is Lew Prince, co-owner of Vintage Vinyl in St. Louis, who is leader of a group called Business for a Fair Minimum Wage. He has traveled from Springfield to Washington, D.C., arguing for a higher state and federal minimum wage.

The Obama administration has called for increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour.

In past years, minimum wage increases were bipartisan. The last was signed into law by President George W. Bush eight years ago.

Even in the midst of acrimony, after a shutdown in the federal government, President Bill Clinton was able to negotiate a minimum wage increase with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Nowadays, however, current House Speaker John Boehner has argued that a minimum wage hike would be a “job killer” and will not allow it to come to a vote.